Behind Closed Doors: Who Speaks For Whom, and How, In Contemporary Photographic Practice
In conjunction with the exhibition Behind Closed Doors (in the Barbara Walters Gallery January 28-March 3; opening reception January 28 at 6 p.m.), Susan Meiselas '70 will discuss representation in photography and her lifelong commitment to honoring and enabling the voice of the other in her work.
Meiselas is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora’s Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003), Prince Street Girls (2016), and A Room of Their Own (2017). A career-spanning retrospective of her work, Mediations, has traveled within the past year from the Fundació Antoni Tàpiesto to the Jeu de Paume in Paris and SFMOMA.
In this event, Meiselas will be joined by Joel Sternfeld, Nobel Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College who will provide a historical context for the problematics of documentary practice, and by Eduardo Cadava, Professor of English at Princeton University, who will add commentary based upon critical thought about images and text as a system of describing urgent matters in the world.
Part of Sarah Lawrence's yearlong Difference in Dialogue series, is free and open to the public, but does require an RSVP. Please e-mail collegeevents@sarahlawrence.edu to reserve your seat.
Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer, author, and director well known and for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in American and international collections. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow and most recently was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to present, was recently exhibited at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Jeu de Paume, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Eduardo Cadava is an author, contemporary critic, and theorist specializing in American literature and culture, comparative literature, media technologies and theory, political theory, and translation theory. He is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School and Princeton University. He is currently working on a collection of essays on the ethics and politics of mourning and co-directing a multiyear project on the relationship between political conflict and climate change.
Joel Sternfeld is a photographer/artist with exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships and a Prix de Rome, he is the author of American Prospects, On This Site, Stranger Passing, and 10 other books. Sternfeld holds the Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College.